Ramblings from the creator of HomeSite, TopStyle, FeedDemon and Glassboard Android.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

What's Coming in the Next FeedDemon?

There will be a few minor FeedDemon releases before the next major version, but "minor" doesn't necessarily mean "small." In fact, the next minor release will include a few oft-requested features:

Big improvements in offline reading: The next FeedDemon contains a number of things that make it even better for offline reading, including the ability to download and cache unread items (as described here and here).

Search tweaks: The subscription search can be limited to a specific date range (screenshot), so you can search for items in subscribed feeds that were posted today, yesterday, this week, etc. And as I mentioned earlier, the address and search boxes are being combined (this small UI change not only conserves space, but it's also pretty useful).

Dinosaurs report: First seen in NetNewsWire, this feature shows you the feeds that haven't updated in a while - great for pruning your subscriptions of inactive feeds (cropped screenshot).

I'm still in "development mode" (also known as "mad scientist mode"), so expect to see other improvements in addition to these.

I tried reading offline on my laptop and then resynchronizing with my desktop over the holidays, but it didn't actually work all that well. In particular, it seemed as if a lot of posts that I read on my laptop didn't get marked read on my desktop even after synchronizing both (first the laptop, then the desktop). Is there anything I can do to further diagnose those issues? I'm assuming that this stuff should Just Work.

FeedDemon/NewsGator currently only syncs read states for posts that are still in the source feed. Once a posts falls of the feed, if you mark it as read the state will not be transferred to other clients.

The good news is that we have a change in place to expand this capability to allow for greater sync transparency, it should be available soon, and won't require you to do anything at your end, it will just start syncing more posts.

The old procedure of using the Mozilla Active X control doesn't seem to work with 2.1. I'd like to see the option of using the Firefox/Mozilla browser back. I assume this has something to do with the pages you've implemented (and I like), but I liked having the option...

Wouldn't the advanced search options be nicer/better in a page in the feed view? As with the search results mimicing (is that a word?) web search engines already, the advanced search might as well. Anyway, with the lack of Jacks pre-release builds it is hard to tell if the dedicated dialog is as dingens as I find it :)

Shannon, it was also because the control was no longer being developed (I don't think any new changes had come out for it since 2005 or early 2006 - way too long these days):

from the release notes:
Changed: The ability to embed the Mozilla control has been dropped. Sorry to have to do this, but the Mozilla Control is no longer being developed, and it doesn't support the features added to newspapers in this version.

Please consider including a way for FeedDemon to update feeds on skipped days (for example Saturday and Sunday) when the computer is off. WOuld be great to be able to have an option to gather all posts back to a certain date and also perhaps to suspend this for "Vacation Mode."

I'm using NewsGator, FeedDemon (on home and work machines) and NewsGator Go! I like the ability to synch to a central source, but I have the following requests/comments.

1. News Bins are local - it would be great if I could synch them.
2. NewsGator Go! - I would like the ability to flag content and possibly e-mail entries to others or store them locally for future reference.

David,
The feature *is* needed, because in Unread Feed View you can not tell whether a feed hasn't been unpdated for a day, a week, a month or since the beginning.
Keeping such feeds (and there can be preety many of them) in the tree slows down everything: refreshing, synchronizing, searching, exiting, subscriptions' newspaper, etc...
Having got 200 feeds or more there is no way to find not updated (in a month's time, or so) ones if you read/skim (and mark as read) all other feeds daily (or weekly).

Nick,
Please add the ability to organize feeds into subfolders in addition to the folders we already have. Secondly I really like the tabbed layout in the open source rss reader RSSOwl. It really seems to maximize the real estate on the screen.